What's Next After That Odd Chicken?

By Tim Padgett

You get a sense of Alex Bogusky's droll perspective when he hands you his business card. It has one rounded corner and reads, "25% safer than most other business cards." It's a little impish, yes, but also engaging, like the offbeat advertising campaigns dreamed up at Bogusky's Miami firm, Crispin Porter & Bogusky. That's the company, after all, that created the Subservient Chicken, Burger King's bizarre chicken-sandwich mascot. The online ad features an actor in a chicken suit and a garter belt who will do just about anything visitors to the site demand (short of poultry porn). Designed to convey Burger King's "Have It Your Way" slogan to a more irreverent, Net-savvy generation, the site subservientchicken.com has recorded over 328 million hits from more than 100 countries since debuting in April.

For Bogusky, this kind of "buzz," or "viral," marketing is advertising's future. Covert, hands-on and unabashedly weird, the genre--industry insiders call it "network-enhanced word of mouth"--has turned websites and other forums into interactive opportunities for advertisers and consumers to connect. Crispin Porter & Bogusky helped make Canada's Molson beer the fastest-growing top-25 import in the U.S. last year as it built up buzz in the bars by slapping on beer bottles labels with oddly suggestive comments like "Skinny-dippers are people too." "Conventional branding tends to piggyback on pop culture," says Bogusky, 41, whose sneakers and long mane befit the college-dorm ambiance of CP&B's Coconut Grove offices. "But the mass media are too fragmented now, so you need to create your own pop culture."

The most fertile ground is the Internet, but viral advertising has barely made a dent in it, Bogusky says. Last month his firm launched another innovative online spot for Burger King: "Angus Interventions" by Dr. Angus of the Angus diet, mascot for the chain's Angus Steak Burgers and a clear spoof on the late diet guru Dr. Robert Atkins. In an effort to convince people that burgers are still hip in a calorie- and carbohydrate-obsessed age, the site, angusdiet.com lets visitors send personalized advice from Dr. Angus, seated at his desk, telling others to loosen up, make lifestyle changes or, as CP&B had the doctor advise me, "stop being a slave to story deadlines."

In the future, Bogusky predicts, viral ads will offer even more participation. "The more stuff people can do themselves with these ads, the better," he says. "It's more fun, but they also feel like they own it. They feel more empowered as consumers." Pete Blackshaw, a founder of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, predicts that viral ads will increasingly harness technology like camera phones. Since "moblogs," or group photo blogs, get tens of thousands of camera-phone images a day, viral marketers are gearing up to let customers chime in visually as well as verbally about their love for a brand of blue jeans or soft drink.

Or their disappointment. Viral marketing could easily morph into a customer-complaint channel. Advertisers who go viral, Bogusky concedes, "will just have to be brave enough to realize that they can't have it all under their control anymore. Those days are over." --By Tim Padgett